tmurphy's posterous

Mobile phones are highly personal instruments and many may feel reluctant to hand over such an important life tool to a complete stranger. But it is all about context and good sense. Ellen: “By giving someone your phone you are saying you trust them, you break through the ice completely. This person has trusted me with their phone and there’s an interesting question on the phone and I’m going to answer it.”

The action of handing over the phone creates the opportunity to bond with people who may otherwise have remained strangers and aids the construction of a more meaningful social experience.

“Using two cameras, you’re replicating human vision,” said stereographer (camera technician) Campbell Goodwille. “And by moving the cameras further apart or closer together, you exaggerate or lessen the 3D effect. It’s almost like a volume control for 3D. If you’re shooting a little insect, the cameras might be 5 or 10 millimeters apart, whereas if you’re shooting a landscape you might have them a couple of feet apart. And that’s about getting apparent depth in stuff you don’t normally see. When you look at something a long way away, you don’t get much stereo [depth] effect so we exaggerate that for the screen.”

Speed lies at the heart of the project.

And then Hillary Clinton arrived. “The secretary is the one who unleashed us,” Ross says. “She’s the godmother of 21st-century statecraft.”

History as it happens.

But as our collections move to our phones, iPods and other automatic list-making devices, this previously-inaccessible data becomes very accessible for manipulation and expression. Not only will we able to supply others with an infographic or some other representation of our data, we can also (if we trust them enough) supply them with our music collection data and they can interpret our listening pleasure according to their own criteria. Previously hard to get at or redundant information is now cheap to obtain and is more relevant and more sharable.

Music collections are a fun place to start with this idea, but in building and designing the ability to access and manage what up until now could have been called data overspill is adding new dimensions to what it is possible to construct. We are entering the era of the augmented space. This handling of excess information - the data overspill - is taking on more and more significance beyond the instant compatibility check of a music collection (which is important enough.)

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day—days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work.

With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to protect you.

Just for a bit of fun we are Social Bits are running a little competition where the prize is €50 worth of Fairtrade Tea or Coffee to fill your winning mug up with.

For the most creative, humorous, strangest mug, it does not have to be your mug, maybe it is one of your colleagues in work. You can dress up your mug with a jumper which you have knitted, you can even make a mug from scratch. It can be filled with something or it can have one of those fancy patterns that your barista has put on your Cappuccino, the brief is just to be creative.

You can tell a lot by the Mug you drink from, for example here is my mug:

The best design explicitly acknowledges that you cannot disconnect the form from the material--the material informs the form," says Ive. "It is the polar opposite of working virtually in CAD to create an arbitrary form that you then render as a particular material, annotating a part and saying 'that's wood' and so on. Because when an object's materials, the materials' processes and the form are all perfectly aligned, that object has a very real resonance on lots of levels. People recognize that object as authentic and real in a very particular way.

Toy Story was originally to star the hero of Lasseter's Tin Toy, a one-man band named Tinny, and a top-hatted ventriloquist's dummy reminiscent of Charlie McCarthy. But both toys were old and worn, and "a buddy picture," explains Stanton, "is about opposites." So Tinny was transformed into a gadget-packed, flashy new toy: a space-superhero action figure. He needed just the right name. "Lunar Larry was too wacky," says Lasseter. "We tried some space words and the term light-year came up. And the coolest astronaut name was Buzz Aldrin. All of a sudden it was Buzz Lightyear. Everybody went, 'That's it!'

“Self-sufficiency – individuals and small teams were given fairly complex objectives and expected to figure out how to achieve them on their own. If you needed to integrate with an outside vendor, you picked up the phone yourself and called; you didn’t wait for a BD person to become available. You did (the first version of) mockups and wireframes yourself; you didn’t wait for a designer to become available. You wrote (the first draft of) site copy yourself; you didn’t wait for a content writer.” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)